Prodigal Summer: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  "Do you think we'd scandalize the family if we went out dancing?"

  "Oh yeah. My mom and aunts think dancing's basically just the warm-up act. Aunt Mary Edna gives this lecture in Sunday school about how dancing always leads to sexual intercourse."

  "Well, she's right, that's probably true for most animals. Insects do that, birds do, even some mammals. But we've got great big brains, you and me. I think we could distinguish a courtship ritual from the act itself. Don't you?"

  Rickie fell backward on the ground and lay there for some time with his cigarette sticking up like a chimney. Eventually he removed it so he could speak. "You know what drives me crazy about you, Lusa? Half the time I don't know what in the hell you're discussing."

  She looked down at him, her beautiful nephew in the grass. "Drives you crazy and that's a bad thing? Or a good thing?"

  He thought about it. "It doesn't have to be good or bad. It's just you. My favorite aunt, Miss Lusa Landowski."

  "Wow. You actually know my name. And here I am just about to change it."

  "Yeah? To what?"

  "Widener."

  Rickie raised his dark eyebrows and looked at her from his prone position. "Really. What for?"

  "For Cole, the kids, all of you. The family. I don't know." She shrugged, feeling a little embarrassed. "It just seems like the thing to do. So this farm will stay where it is on our little map of the world. It's an animal thing, I guess. Marking a territory."

  "Huh," he said.

  "So, let's go dancing, OK? Absolutely no funny business, we'll just dance till we drop, shake hands, and say good night. I need the exercise. You free this Saturday?"

  "I am free as a bird this Saturday," he said, still flat on his back, smiling grandly at the sky.

  "Good. Because you know, I'm going to be a mother pretty soon. I'd better get out and paint the town red a time or two while I've still got the chance."

  Rickie sat up and stubbed out his cigarette pensively in the grass. "That's really nice that you're taking those kids. I mean, nice, hell--it's more than that."

  Lusa shrugged. "I'm doing it for me as much as for them."

  "Well, my mom and Aunt Mary Edna think it's like this gift from God, that you're doing it. They said you're a saint."

  "Oh, come on."

  "No, I swear to God that's what they said. I heard 'em say it."

  "Wow," she said. "What a trip. From devil-worshiper to saint in one short summer."

  {28}

  Old Chestnuts

  This world was full of perils, thought Garnett, and Nannie Rawley was as trusting as a child. She didn't even realize this man was up to no good. Hanging on to her like a cocklebur, but fifty times more dangerous. Garnett had heard of things as strange as a younger man's buttering up some pitiful, sweet old woman and marrying her for her money. Now, on that score Nannie was safe, because she probably didn't have two dimes to rub together until harvest season was done and her crop sold, but she did have the best-producing orchard in five counties, and no living descendants, and everybody around here knew it. There was no telling what this sneaky snake had on his mind.

  Garnett couldn't swear he knew, either, but he knew this much: for two days now, every time he'd happened to catch a glimpse of Nannie out in her garden, there he'd been, leaning on the fence. He hadn't even lifted a finger to help her carry her bushel baskets of squash and corn into the house. If that fellow set foot inside her house, Garnett was prepared to call up Timmy Boyer on the telephone and get him over here. He would have to. She didn't know enough to protect herself.

  He finished folding the shirts he'd washed yesterday in the washing machine and dried in the dryer. He held the last one up by the peaks of its shoulders and stared at it. It looked as wrinkled and worn as he felt himself. Ellen had had some way of getting them to come out nice and smooth, even without the ironing board. On cool winter mornings before he went to school she'd hand him a shirt to put on that felt as warm as a wife's embrace, and he'd carry that little extra measure of affection on his shoulders all day long. No matter what affronts of youthful insolence he had to face in his day, he'd still have that: he was a man taken care of by a woman.

  He piled the folded shirts into a stack as neatly as he could, put the balled-together socks on top, and carried the whole thing upstairs. He paused by the window at the landing, balancing the folded clothes on one hand and drawing the sheer curtain aside with the other.

  Almighty stars, there he still was, like a wolf waiting for the lamb. She was not even anywhere in sight. What kind of nerve would it take to just stand there waiting for her like that, with his elbows up on the fence? Garnett squinted hard, trying to bring the details of the man's appearance into focus. By gosh, he wasn't even that good-looking. On the portly side, if the truth be told. Portly, going to lumpy. Garnett felt so irritated he dropped a pair of socks. Never mind, he'd pick them up later. He peered as far as he could into the shadows of Nannie's backyard, but she didn't seem to be around there, either.

  Well, then, he thought suddenly, wildly--this was his chance. He could go over there this minute and give that fellow his walking papers. That garden fence was not ten feet from Garnett's line, and he had as much right as anybody to chase off no-goods and vagrants from the neighborhood.

  Garnett went on up to the bedroom first, to put his shirts in the bureau drawer. Yes, by gosh, he thought, he was going to do it. He briefly considered fetching his shotgun but then decided against it. He hadn't fired a gun in many a year, since the days when he could claim a better eye and a steadier hand, though he was sure he could still shoot in a pinch, if he had to. The thought gave him courage. Maybe just holding the shotgun would steady him. He wouldn't load it; there wasn't any need. He would just carry it out there with him, to give him the air of a man who meant business.

  He walked around to the closet on Ellen's side of the bed, where he tended to keep things he never planned on needing again. The door had gone off its frame a little and scraped the floor as he dragged it open. He batted at the darkness like a blind man, trying to find the pull string to switch the light on, and nearly jumped out of his shirt when something big plummeted down off the shelf, bouncing off his shoulder as it fell. Ellen's old round hatbox. It landed on its side, and out rolled Ellen's navy-blue church hat on its brim, describing a small half-circle on the floor before sitting down flat beside the bed.

  "Ellen," he said aloud, staring at the hat.

  The hat, of course, made no reply. It merely sat there, flat on its proper little brim, adorned with its little bunch of artificial cherries. If it could have folded its hands in its lap, it would have.

  "Well, don't scare me like that, woman. I'm doing the best I can."

  He grabbed his shotgun with both hands and hurried out of the bedroom, reaching around behind him to pull the door shut. She didn't need to see this.

  "Man, state your business," Garnett called out from the clump of wild cherries in the fencerow, a hundred feet from where the fellow still stood. He gave no sign of having seen or heard Garnett--ha!--who still had it in him to be stealthy as a good deer hunter. The thought gave him some satisfaction, and perhaps a little daring.

  He cleared his throat, since his last words had come out sounding a little wobbly, and called out again. "Hello there!"

  Nothing.

  "I said, hello. I'm Garnett Walker, I own this land here, and I'd like to know your business, if you don't mind."

  The man didn't speak, did not so much as turn his head. Garnett had never seen such a display of rudeness. Even the boy who drove the UPS truck would nod a reluctant hello when pressed.

  Garnett squinted. This man looked so slack he could be dead. He didn't look young, though. Young people, Garnett had observed, often gave the impression of having too little gumption to hold up their heads. But this fellow didn't even seem to have a head. He was hunkered down with his arms crossed in front of him on the fence and an old, dusty-looking fedora pulled down over his ears. His whol
e body leaned against his arms in an unnatural way, like a pole leaning against a fence. Everything about him appeared unnatural, in fact, from the way his arms in the blue work shirt bent in curves, as if his elbows were rubber instead of hinges, to the trunklike aspect of his big lumpy legs in those jeans. Garnett got the strangest feeling, as if he'd turned up in somebody else's dream wearing no clothes. He felt a blush creep down the front of his neck, though there was no one here to witness it. Thanks be to the Lord for that, no witnesses. He set his gun down gently on its butt end, with its bore against the trunk of the cherry, and stepped through the gate, a few paces onto Nannie's side, to get a better look at the face.

  But of course there was no face. There was just a stuffed pillowcase with a hat on it, stuck down into a stuffed shirt and pants. Garnett recalled the locust rail and crossbeam Nannie had been nailing together in her garage. He nearly fell to his knees. For the last two days he'd been burning up with suspicion and ire and jealousy. Yes, even that. He'd been jealous of a scarecrow.

  He turned to leave before things got worse.

  "Garnett Walker!" she cried, coming around the corner of her house in a hurry.

  He sighed. Between Garnett and Nannie, things always did get worse. He should know that by now. He should just give in. There was no paddling upstream against this river. "Hello, Miss Rawley."

  She stopped short, with her hands on her hips. She was wearing a skirt, probably getting ready to go to the market. She always prettied herself up a little for market day, in her calico skirt and her braids. She looked quizzical as a little bird, with her head cocked to the side. "I thought I heard somebody over here calling me," she said.

  Garnett looked at his hands. Empty. "I was coming over to see if you needed help. Any help loading up your truck for the Amish market. I know how it is for you this time of year. When the winesaps start to come in."

  He could have laughed, for how surprised she looked.

  "With winesaps," he added emphatically, "when it rains, it pours."

  She shook her head. "Well, will wonders never cease."

  "I've lived next door to an orchard for the better part of eighty years," he prattled on, sounding foolish even to himself. "I have eyes. I can see it's enough work to break a donkey's back."

  She looked at him sideways. "Are you angling for another pie?"

  "Now, look here, I don't think that's fair. Just because I've offered to help you out, you don't have to act like the sky's falling. It's not the first time."

  "No," she said. "You gave me the shingles, too. Those were a godsend."

  "I think it would be fair to say I've been a good neighbor lately."

  "You have," she agreed. "You'll have to forgive me if it all takes a while to sink in. I'm just blessed off my rocker these days. I've come into an embarrassment of riches."

  He wondered what that could possibly mean, and whether it was polite to ask. "I didn't know you had relatives anywhere," he tried. "To inherit from."

  She laughed, laying her hands flat on the front of her skirt "That's just what I've done," she said, "I've inherited a relative. Two of them, in fact."

  Garnett became a little confused, thinking briefly of the man hanging around on the fence, who of course was no man at all, with no interest in anyone's inheritance. He waited for Nannie to explain--which she always did, if you waited long enough.

  "Deanna Wolfe," she said simply. "She's coming to live with me."

  Garnett thought about this. "Ray Dean's girl?" he asked, feeling briefly, nonsensically jealous of the young Ray Dean Wolfe, who'd courted Nannie for more years than most people now stayed married. Nannie had been so happy in those days, you could hear her singing on any day but a rainy one. But Ray Dean Wolfe was buried in the cemetery now.

  "That's right, his girl Deanna. She's like a daughter to me. You knew that."

  "I thought she'd gone to live up in the mountains here somewhere, working for the government."

  "She did. She's been up there in a cabin living all by herself for two years. But now she's taking a leave from her job and coming back down. And here's the part you have to sit down for: she's going to have a baby."

  "Well, that is a shock." He squinted up toward the mountains. "How did that happen, do you think?"

  "I don't know, and I don't care. I don't care if the daddy's a mountain lion, I'm going to have a grandbaby!"

  Garnett shook his head, clucking his tongue. Nannie looked like the cat that'd swallowed the canary. Women and grandbabies, there was nothing on this earth to beat it. Like Ellen fretting on her deathbed over that child of Shel's. And now there were two of them, a boy and the girl. That Lexington gal with her goats had called him up on the telephone, plumb out of the blue, and announced that she wanted to bring those kids over to see his farm. They wanted to see the chestnut trees. His trees.

  "I've got grandchildren, too," he told Nannie.

  "You always did," she said. "You're just too high-handed to bother learning their names."

  "The girl's name is Crystal, and the boy's Lowell. They're coming over here on Saturday." How Garnett had plucked those names from the mossy crevices of his memory, even he would never know. "I was thinking I might be able to teach them how to bag flowers and make crosses," he added. "On my chestnut trees. To help me keep it all going."

  To his great satisfaction, Nannie looked stunned. "How did that happen?" she asked finally.

  "Well, I don't think a mountain lion had much to do with it."

  She stood looking at Garnett with her mouth open. If she wasn't careful, he thought, she'd get a bee in there. Then her eye caught on something behind him, and she frowned. "What's that over yonder leaning on the tree in the fencerow?"

  He turned and looked. "Oh. That's my shotgun."

  "I see. And might I ask what it's doing over there?"

  Garnett studied it. "Not very much. Just leaning up against the tree, it looks to me like."

  "All right, how did it get there, then?"

  "It came out to have words with this fellow who's been leaning up against your fence for the last couple of days."

  She laughed. "Oh, this is Buddy. I don't believe you've met."

  "Well, Buddy gave us a little bit of a worry."

  She narrowed her eyes at Garnett. "Is that right?"

  "I'm afraid so."

  "And you came over to make sure I was all right, is that what you're telling me? You came over here with your shotgun to protect me from my scarecrow?"

  "I had to," Garnett said, spreading his hands, throwing himself on her mercy. "I didn't care for the way Buddy was looking at you in your short pants."

  Now Nannie looked more than stunned; she looked lightning-struck. She stared at him until a smile broke out and spread over her face like the sun coming out after a storm. She walked to him with her arms out like a sleepwalker's, put those arms around his waist, and hugged him tightly with her head resting against his chest. It took him a minute and a half before he thought to put his arms around her shoulders and keep them there. He felt as stiff as old Buddy--as if he, too, had nothing inside his shirt and pants but newspaper and straw. But then, by and by, his limbs relaxed. And she just stayed there like a calm little bird inside the circle of his arms. It was astonishing. Holding her this way felt like a hard day's rest. It felt like the main thing he'd been needing to do.

  "Mr. Walker. Garnett. Will wonders never cease," she said once again, and to be certain they did not, Garnett held her there. She turned her face up and looked at him. "And here I'm finally going to have a grandbaby in my house, and you're going to have two. You've always got to have the last word, don't you?"

  "Now, Nannie. You're a difficult woman."

  She laid the side of her face against his frail old heart, where the pink shell of her ear could capture whatever song it had left.

  "Garnett. You're a sanctimonious old fart."

  {29}

  Predators

  The roar of rain, pounding rain on the cabin's tin
roof, was loud enough to drive a mind to madness. It occurred to Deanna that if she screamed, she probably wouldn't hear herself. She opened her mouth and tried it. She was right.

  She sat on the bed, hugging her knees to her chest. Trying not to think of it as the bed, she'd pulled up the blankets and propped pillows against the wall to make it into a couch or something--someplace to get comfortable that wasn't bed. Inside this white roar she felt as cabin-fevered and trapped as she'd been in the dark of last winter. She plucked at a hole in the toe of her sock, picked up a book, put it down again. For hours she'd tried to read, but the noise had reached a point of drowning out all hope of concentration. She covered her ears with her hands for some relief, and listened to the different roar created by her cupped hands. A throbbing whoosh, the sea in a seashell--she remembered hearing it for the first time on a beach. She and Dad and Nannie had gone to Virginia Beach two summers in a row. A hundred and ten years ago, and a hundred and nine.

  It wasn't the ocean, of course, but the tide of her own circulation pulsing inside her, sound carried through bone to her eardrums. Deanna shut her eyes and listened harder, trying to hear some small difference now that her heart was pumping her blood through an extra set of arteries. She'd been craving some proof, but the change so far seemed to inhabit her body only ethereally, like a thought or a magic charm. For now she would have to live with magic.

  When she dropped her hands from her ears, the rain seemed even louder. Flashes of lightning brightened the window in an irregular but steady way, like fireworks. The thunder she couldn't hear, but its vibrations reached her through the floor, shuddering up the legs of the iron bed. She considered climbing under the blankets and covering her head with the pillows, but that would be bed, alone, and the awful trembling would still reach her. There was no escape, and this storm was growing closer. It was only four o'clock in the afternoon, but the sky was dark as dusk, and darkening deeper by the minute. An hour ago Deanna had decided she'd never seen a storm like this in these mountains in all her life. And that was an hour ago.

  Surprised, she remembered her radio. It offered no practical assistance, but it would be company. She jumped up and crossed to the desk to retrieve the little radio from the bottom drawer. She turned it on, held it next to her ear, heard nothing. She studied the thing, located the dial that controlled the volume, and turned it all the way up, but still not a crackle. Batteries, she thought: they'd go dead over time just sitting around. She ransacked the drawer for more batteries, knowing perfectly well she always forgot to put these on her list. Finally she scavenged the ones from her little flashlight, the spare she kept on the shelf by the door.